This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below, after the main part of the detailed description section.
One set of requirements which will be introduced in the future wireless communication systems is to support ultra-reliable communications (URC) and low-latency communications. These requirements are much more stringent compared to those in the current systems such as 4G LTE systems. URC is required to enable new emerging applications such as traffic safety, especially for scenarios with autonomous driving, industrial automation, and e-health service for example.
For example, some road safety applications require that the information packets are delivered successfully with very high probability and within a certain period of the time. Another example is industry automation, where reliability and latency are the most important criteria for system designs. The failure to comply with these requirements can have serious implications for the well-being of the users relying on the road safety service or serious damage in case of industry automation.